Dylan: Once Again, It's Alright Ma

Only an aquiline nose and a pair of scuffy cheeks peeked out from behind the purdah of colored glasses, gray muffler, and hotel towel anchored Arab-style by a pillbox chapeau. But the imperious stare, the twitching extremities and the spindly silhouette of Bob Dylan, 32, belied the Bedouin disguise. The erstwhile revolutionary folkie, rock-'n 'roll innovator and countrified cop-out was back after an eight-year absence from concert touring. Perched atop a hotel couch in Philadelphia (the second of 21 cities in his current six-week tour), Dylan was solidly re-ensconced as the reigning song-poet laureate of young America.

With him was TIME Correspondent David DeVoss, 26, a member of the generation that grew up on Dylan 's songs and that is now returning to auditoriums and stadiums for a historical second look. De Voss 's report:

"All this publicity," Dylan sniffed tiredly, following two performances in a single day. "Sometimes I think they're talking about somebody else. I take it as it comes, but I'm not certain it's beneficial to my life." He paused to rub a bare foot against his faded jeans.

For thousands of young Americans, Bob Dylan is one of the very few personalities to emerge intact from the '60s whirlwind. A vindicated Cassandra who, in crystallizing once vague discontents, transformed dissent from an intellectual hobby to a public cause, Dylan sang about the turmoil of a generation. The generation listened. Now it remembers.

Thus far on the tour, Dylan's concerts have taken on the panoply of clan reunions. Hours before his scheduled appearance, stadium parking lots become agoras for hundreds who browse about looking at Dylan T shirts, posters and songbooks hawked by local vendors. They are subdued crowds--"laid back" in the vernacular of the present --but once inside they unite to buffet Dylan with waves of applause after each song. Roaring pleas for encores and repeated standing ovations are standard features. Lighted matches, signifying the rebirth of Woodstock solidarity, are regularly held aloft.

Never in the history of American rock has a tour aroused so much public interest. Within hours after mailorder tickets were put on sale, more than 5,000,000 letters, each requesting an average of three tickets, inundated post offices along the tour route. One trade paper calculated that 7.5% of the population of the U.S. had requested tickets to see Dylan and his bluesy bayou back-up group, the Band. In Los Angeles County, the 18,700-seat Forum received about 300,000 ticket requests. In New York City, Dylan followers seeking 12:01 a.m. postmarks on first-come, first-served mail orders created frantic midnight rushes. Frazzled promoters in San Francisco, faced with an ever-growing mountain of mail, finally bought newspaper ads imploring: "Please, no more mail orders."

Most performers would be elated, but Dylan, emerging from his isolation, is almost indifferent. "I try not to deal with the audience response," he said. "Too synthetic. Besides, it would be more than I could handle. I'm just basically interested in real things."

Still, it is quite a triumph for somebody who set out from Minnesota in 1961 on a pilgrimage to the bed of the dying Woody Guthrie, his only ambition to "make it big." The fact that along the way Dylan became an oracle was almost accidental, involuntary. While his musical contemporaries were becoming mirrors of society, Dylan, almost in spite of himself, became its conscience, a reluctant Eumenide. Instead of warbling teen-age love songs, he wrote about bigotry, nuclear destruction, war profiteers and social desolation. Dylan was background for a campus rap session, inspiration for an essay. He was the brooding presence uniting thousands of unsatisfied students, a pioneer who purged the inanities from popular music with surrealistic epigrams and metaphysical subtleties.

"When I first took my music on the road back in '60, it was in search of something else that wasn't being covered," Dylan said last week in a rare interview. "I let it happen by itself, and it grew and matured by itself. Everybody has matured, musicians included. A lot of these people [referring to his followers] and myself have a great deal in common. As for the music ... I just let the rope out."

Nasal Howl. From the moment they shamble onstage to begin their low-key performance, Dylan and the Band are in complete control of the audience. Dylan's early folk-rock numbers, punctuated by Band standards like The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and Up on Cripple Creek, are knocked out with an almost blase professionalism. But if Dylan is short on emotion, he makes up for it in energy. Shouting into the microphone in his haunting nasal howl, he spits out his message like a cobra. Since neither the performers nor the songs need introduction, there is no chatter between numbers. Dylan's acknowledgment of the audience is slight: a simple bow from the waist after each song and a terse announcement of the intermission.

After the break, he walks on, sometimes clad in shining white denim, for a solo set of songs accompanied by his own acoustical guitar and ubiquitous harmonica. It is the most exciting part of the show. Dylan, his halo of curly hair limned by the iridescent hues of the stage lights, is greeted by thunderous cheers. After four or five of his early ballads, he is again joined by the Band for a crescendo of electrified folk-rock songs studded with powerful guitar riffs. From then on, the shouting seldom stops.

For those of us who first grasped for maturity during the decade past, a Dylan concert is a three-hour detour through deja vu. Like images on Plato's cave, Clearasil coeds with Joan Baez hair and men silently hunkered inside thick pea jackets appear and quickly pass-- yesterday's graduate students, now headed toward paunch or pregnancy. Dylan concerts draw people who inhabited the fringes of campus teach-ins, rode Mississippi freedom buses and marched down endless University Avenues searching for an end to the draft.

Both Dylan and his followers have mellowed. The angry faces of the '60s are softer now, and evidences of the future generations we were trying to save can occasionally be seen toddling along the crowded aisles. The arrogance of both poet and pupils is diminished, but the lyrics of songs like A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, Mr. Tambourine Man and Desolation Row have grown in potency. Adult perspective makes songs, like My Back Pages, more meaningful:

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats Too noble to neglect Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect Good and bad. I define these terms Quite clear, no doubt, somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then I'm younger than that now.

"He's all of us," cried one Pittsburgh coed, as she hurried for the subway after one of Dylan's concerts in Philadelphia. "He's all the things we always felt but could never eloquently express."

Dylan's eloquence stems partly from a salutary imprecision. His throbbing harmonica, Delphic imagery and occasional Chaplinesque two-step are constants, but his message, like the times, is continually changing. "This show is definitely not nostalgia," he whispered last week between silences and long stares. "To my mind, I deal with certain problems. It's an up-to-date show."

In ending his exile, Dylan once more takes up his subtle revolution. His fans, nurtured on unstructured polemic and cinema verite, are being invited on a new journey, and if their expectant faces are to be believed, they are ready to follow. Each night on the tour, Dylan receives an ovation when he sings the line, "But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked," from It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding). In Dirge, a song from his soon-to-be-released album Planet Waves, his forceful lyrics are an eloquent, melancholy study of an individual searching for a niche in an anonymous society dominated by "progress."

I hate that foolish game we played And the need that was expressed And the mercy that you showed to me Who ever would have guessed I went out on lower Broadway And I felt that place within That hollow place where martyrs weep And angels play with sin.

Yet the thrust of his performances is one of cautious optimism: a guarded belief that conditions can improve. In Forever Young, he says:

May your hands always be busy May your feet always be swift May you have a strong foundation When the winds of changes shift May your heart always be joyful May your song always be sung May you stay forever young.

They were exciting iconoclastic times, those '60s. "We"--the baby boomers--had the schools, the attention of the media, a good proportion of the nation's disposable income, and most important, we had a distinct music. The strange new sound of folk rock took over radio. Soon the white-middle-class blues, a lament where computers and corporations replaced landlords and scabs, was stirring an entire society.

A higher reality was at hand, but like a burst of light in a dark room, it proved to be illusory. Poverty programs, free universities and Camelot gave way to Kent State, Cambodia and urban terrorism. The toll of death and deterioration set in: The Kennedys, King, Dak To, Khe Sanh, Watergate. The clenched fist replaced the V sign as idealists turned cynical. Dylan and his followers withdrew into a more personal and private world. After a near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1966, Dylan moved to his home in Woodstock, N.Y., and switched from participant to observer to chronicle the halcyon days of "the movement" in songs like Time Passes Slowly.

Time passes slowly up here in the mountains, We sit beside bridges and walk beside fountains, Catch the wild fishes that float through the stream, Time passes slowly when you 're lost in a dream.

A generation of activists grew apathetic: the old spirit of Dylan and Joan Baez seemed to have evaporated. The stage was taken over by a capering rearguard of glitter rockers, demonists and hip vaudevillians.

Now, in Dylan's return, illuminated by the slow flicker of thousands of matches, the old spirit seems to emerge anew. At each concert, the hush of anticipation, the buzz of uncertainty and the applause of recognition are extensions of young people again listening to his words and looking for their meaning. Arms linked together, swaying in unison, chanting in time to the psychic current, a generation's anthem-- learned in adolescence, sung in protest but not finally understood until periods of adult crisis--is being sung once more:

How does it feel, How does it feel To be on your own With no direction home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone?

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